Tech giant looks to power stores with renewable energy

Associated Press

Published 8:47 pm, Monday, April 21, 2014

Apple is offering free recycling of all its used products and vowing to power all of its stores, offices and data centers with renewable energy to reduce the pollution caused by its devices and online services.

The iPhone and iPad maker is detailing its efforts to cultivate a greener Apple Inc. in an environmental section on the company's website that debuted Monday. The site highlights the ways that the Cupertino, Calif., company is increasing its reliance on alternative power sources and sending less electronic junk to landfills.

Apple had already been distributing gift cards at some of its 420 worldwide stores in exchange for iPhones and iPods still in good enough condition to be resold. Now, all of the company's stores will recycle any Apple product at no charge. Gift cards won't be handed out for recycled products deemed to have little or no resale value.

The offer covers a wide array of electronics that aren't supposed to be dumped in landfills because of the toxins in them. In the past seven years alone, Apple has sold more than 1 billion iPhones, iPods, iPads and Mac computers.

The new initiative, timed to coincide with Tuesday's annual celebration of Earth Day, strives to position Apple as an environmental steward amid the technological whirlwind of gadgets and Internet services that have been drawing more electricity from power plants that primarily run on natural gas and coal.

Technology products and services accounted for 2 percent of worldwide emissions in 2012, roughly the same as the airline industry, according to statistics cited by environmental protection group Greenpeace in a report earlier this month. Some of the biggest electricity demands come from huge data centers that house the stacks of computers that process search requests, store photos and email and stream video.

These online services, often dubbed "cloud computing," consume more electricity than all but five countries — China, the U.S., Japan, India and Russia.

As the world's largest technology company, Apple is trying to hatch more environmental solutions than problems.

"What the company wants to do is use all our innovation and all of our expertise to make the planet more secure and make the environment better," Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environmental initiatives, said Monday. Jackson ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama before joining Apple last June.

Apple CEO Tim Cook underscored the commitment by narrating a 1 minute, 44-second video about the company's efforts. "To us, better is a force of nature," Cook says in the video.